Editors' Review

If Firefox and iTunes hooked up, their hatchling could very well be Songbird. Almost ready for prime-time and still a bit buggy, it's also a very fun app that's part music player, part Web browser, and all about music discovery, management, and playback.

During installation, it'll ask if you want to load your iTunes music directory or another media directory, or perform the task later. Processing 5,000 songs took about 3 minutes, not a bad pace. It then asks you which of the pre-installed Songbird extensions you want to load. Most of these, like the iPod and USB device manager, only make the app stronger.

The left sidebar provides quick links to bookmarks, downloads, your music library in an iTunes-style interface, and several music discovery Web sites to get your started. When you're looking at any Web site with MP3s available for download, Songbird will open a new window at the bottom main browsing pane. Double-click on a song to play it, while links on the right let you purchase the track from Amazon, iTunes, eMusic, and Amie St. They also tell you the format of the track--MP3 or AAC, for example, and provide a blog link for more info.

Songbird has a growing library of extensions, and support is slowly growing for those written originally for Firefox. Many of the improvements from the last version make for a dramatic change, and Songbird is now stable enough to take flight for the music-loving, Web-surfing fanatic in all of us.

It's easily the best media player out there. mashTape(built-in) shows information about the song and artist, and Lyrics Master automatically pulls lyrics off the internet and even gives you the option to overwrite the existing lyrics.

Cons

It uses an outrageous amount of memory, more so than iTunes. On Windows 7, It starts up with 90MB, and goes up once you play a song, and it just keeps going up with each play. Even with 4GB of memory, it leaves a noticeable imprint.

Summary

Lyrics Master and Mashtape are keeping me on board with this one. There is a way to tune the memory usage, but it requires you change the configuration and look for rather obscure numbers.

I still utilize WMP11 and/or WinAmp more often than SongBird. I personally believe WMP11 has the best sound quality out of all of them (I play 192K 6.1 channel WMA), and WinAmp has my G15 keyboard plugin and pars very close to WMP11 in quality. I have gotten used to the WMP11 Album Art Library Display Mode and kind think most anything else that doesn't have something comparable is lacking. If you're looking for something simple, though, SongBird is for you.

Using version 1.2:It does not work with many subscription feeds ( http://freetalklive.com/netcast.xml ) With the ones it does work on, it will continue to re download songs every time because it's not smart enough to know it already has them.

Summary

This is the same behavior that the older version had that we were promised a fix for. The software is just S***, don't use it. There are many alternatives out there that actually work for this. (Rhythmbox is one)

Doesn't get iPod support out of the boxNeeds some tweaking 'cause startup is slow

Summary

Making a partition for Windows 7, I moved some music from Vista to 7. Only to not have have my album art and artist information show up in Windows Media Player. So I decided to try out Songbird since I've heard about it from several sites. My album art and artist info automatically showed up.

I'm very happy with Songbird and will stick around for future updates. Hopefully some performance improvements.

Its free, connects to major networks like tweeter, facebook, shoutcast radio, last fm, can browse web from the player. PLUG-INS are major help to it, more and more will be added with time so there is lots of potential.

Cons

For some reason my zen vision m and song bird player would both crash and would have to reset my mp3 player and restart songbird, tsk tsk, player needs some performance improvements but again its only version 1.2.

Summary

Good player with LOTS of potential in plug ins. Its starting out good but there is room to improve. I will use this for a duplicate library of about 20 GB in case anything goes wrong.

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